WordPress powers millions of blogs, and is used in a wide variety of situations. Thanks to its flexibility, many companies use it in place of a traditionally designed website, and with the many themes and plugins available, you can do some pretty cool stuff with multimedia. If you’ve been on the interwebs for any length of time, you’re familiar with the sales page. Usually it starts out with bold, bright text, and is followed by pages of why you need to buy XYZ product or service.

For the average blogger, if you’re trying to sell your own product or service, having a dedicated sales page may be a bit overkill. In fact, there are many sales pages that are just whipped up on a new page. However, if you’d like a bit more control with something, there is an easy way to create a WordPress-powered sales page. As with any self-hosted blog, you’ll need to pay for hosting, but the theme mentioned in this post is free. Created by Syamsul Alam, it installs just like any other theme. First, you’ll need to go here, and click the download link at the very top. I’ve inspected the code, and nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

The only thing that might need fixing is the text for the 404 page. Depending on your audience, saying “Sorry dude” may not be the best way of putting it :-) Once you’ve downloaded the theme, upload it to your themes folder on the appropriate WordPress install. Then, go to “Appearance,” “Themes,” and you should now see “Paper Sales Page Theme.” Click “Activate” and you’re ready to go. Your site, having not been customized yet, will look like this:

Now, we begin work on the actual sales page. With this theme, you don’t have to write it among all sorts of code, but write it under a new page. The title of your page will serve as the SEO title, and the body will serve as the actual sales page. Any text (headlines) wrapped in an h1 title tag will appear bold red. Here’s a quick example I whipped up:

Not half bad huh? The possibilities are endless, and it’s especially an easy way to create a sales page without needing to know how to code. Once your sales page is ready to go live, hit “Publish” and we now need to make sure it actually shows up. To do this, on the left-hand sidebar, click on “Settings” and then “Reading.” For the sales page to display on your homepage, you have to display a static page. Where it says “Front page displays,” check the box next to “A static page” and from the drop-down menu, pick the page you just created. Once you’re finished, don’t forget to click “Save changes” at the bottom.

If you recall, there are still links at the bottom of the sales page that may or may not be necessary depending on your situation. There’s also an area to enter your name, company name, and so on. To edit this area, go back to “Appearance,” but this time click “Editor.” On the right-hand side under “Templates” you want to click on “Footer”. You can now change all the links or text, and insert more appropriate company details. Also worth mentioning, it probably wouldn’t hurt to make the copyright date more modern.

This is a simple, free way to create a WordPress-powered sales page, but if you want far more customization, and even more uses, it may be worth investing in a product like OptimizePress.

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